My Name Is Phantom
by GentleSoul76
Summary: A Danny Phantom and Black Haze crossover. Rough Black Haze timeline, eventual Canon divergence. When Casper High gets blown up in a ghost attack, the students of Casper High get transferred to Helios, School of Magic. How much trouble can one ghost boy get into at a school filled with magicians and the other suspicious people that lurk there? SERIES NOW UNDER SERIOUS REVISION.
1. Chapter 1

Danny feels a bit tired and a little sarcastic. After fighting (and getting severely beaten by) Vortex, gaining weather powers from the fight, and then somehow beating Vortex with said weather powers (that went away at some point, thankfully) with the help of Tucker's mood helmet, (to send Vortex back to the Observants from whom he had _somehow_ escaped from, nice one, Plasmius) you would think he would get a bit of a break.

But no, now Danny is at school in the middle of the night fighting the Lunch Lady ghost (lamenting the lunch menu change, _again_ ), when all he'd wanted was to get his forgotten History book.

Except there's no one there but Danny, which does have it's advantages, he must admit; no students or teachers nearby to get hurt during the fight, for one. But the disadvantage is that _DANNY_ is the sole target of the lunch lady's fury, and he's not operating on enough sleep to fight effectively. Plus the fact that he has no back up to speak of makes not getting stabbed by a bunch of sentient kitchen knives that much harder. He finally dredges up enough brain capacity to trick the kitchen knives into snapping themselves in half on the granite floors.

 _Ha! Not so sharp now, are you?_

He decides to save that pun for a later date, because he's not sure he could say it right at the moment with his limited brain functions. But those knives must really not have been that smart, to get tricked so easily.

 _Maybe they were sleep deprived too?_

His thoughts are half hysterical from tiredness as he turns tangible again and floats rightside up to face the lunch lady. The school kitchen is a wreck, Danny notes, plates shattered, the lunch line food containers- _what're those called, again?-_ are dented from Danny being thrown on top of them, silverware scattered and broken, the walls dented.

"Would you like a cookie?" The Lunch Lady asks sweetly, a green ghost cookie proffered to him in her yellow gloved hand.

Danny knows not to be put off his guard by this, though. Berating himself for getting distracted, he settles into a battle-ready stance _(float?)_ and replies, "Uh, no thank you? I mean, it's a bit late at night for sweets, my mom would probably get mad if she heard." He shrugs apologetically and tries for a smile, because maybe, just maybe, this time she won't blow up in his face.

The lunch lady's body language changes from friendly to hostile, her white apron and pink plaid lunch lady attire getting ruffled in a ghostly wind that starts gravitating toward her as she says, "No? fine! Then face my meaty fist, and my ovenly wrath of _DOOM!_ "

 _Ovenly?_

Danny's eyes dart to the back, where the meat is kept. On cue, a huge assortment of frozen meat flies toward her and stick onto her body like armour. Danny tiredly watches as more and more meat piles onto itself, forming the massive meat monster and adding to it's bulk, until it can barely fit and has to hunch down or break the ceiling.

 _Wait, Ovenly, like, an oven?_

Danny's sleepy brain finally muddles through the wording of earlier. He should be shouting out some sort of lunch related pun right about now, something smart and witty that makes him feel less afraid, (or tired) but Danny is distracted by the sudden dread curdling in his stomach, because on top of one of the ovens, one of the ovens levitating and spitting fire and _heating up at an alarming rate,_ sits a Nasty Burger bag, filled with a god-awful amount of Nasty Sauce that Tucker had asked him to pick up, the guy hoards the stuff to put on food at home and- _Oh god._

The smell of burning plastic fills the air, the ovens are _turning molten red_ from the heat they're putting out, they _aren't supposed to do that_. Images of his mom, dad, sister, and Tucker and Sam tied to the Nasty Sauce boiler in the Nasty Burger assault Danny's consciousness, and the thought-

 _Get out of there!_

 _Finally_ enters his head when he remembers _that_ explosion, sees it dancing across his vision, so vivid as to almost be real. It rattles around in his head as Danny flees, going through the walls with intangibility, pouring on the speed, welcome adrenaline coursing through his system for the first time of the night.

 _Fear will do that to you,_ Danny thinks, heart beating fast as the halls he's speeding through become brighter when his eyes dilate and he phases through the front door of the school- and collides with Mr. Lancer, who must have just been leaving.

He doesn't pause, just keeps going with Mr. Lancer in his arms, flying full speed through the air. But Danny doesn't think it's fast enough, they're only about 8 feet from the door (by Danny's math, which is pretty bad) when he hears the explosion, and then the shockwave hits, heat and force hitting Danny's back and knocking him out of the sky.

The next thing Danny hears are his ears ringing, and he registers that they're on the ground when he next hears, " _Chronicles of Narnia!"_ from Mr. Lancer, very nearby, maybe, it's hard to tell with everything muffled and ringing. Danny opens his eyes, _(when did he close them?)_ and sees that the school, a lot more than 8 feet away now by Danny's poor math, has been torn apart and blown to flaming smithereens by the shockwave and pressure buildup from the vapor explosion caused by the Nasty Sauce.

Danny, wondering why they aren't dead, realises the position he's in, on his back with his hands up, a shimmering green ectoplasm shield surrounding them.

 _I must have put it up by instinct. That really intensive secret training with just Sam has really paid off._ He muses, watching the wreckage of Casper High burn and crumble some more. After making sure the explosion is over, Danny puts down the shield and stands up, groaning, feeling every cut and scrape from the fight in the kitchen, and the burn on his back and the singes in his hair from the explosion.

 _But if I spend a few hours as Phantom, they'll heal up quick enough. I should maybe be worried about Mr. Lancer.._

He looks down at Mr. Lancer, who was still sitting and staring at the school, swearing his weird swears in increasing vehemence.

"Uhm, excuse me, sir, are you alright?" Danny Phantom asks, putting on his 'Danny Phantom voice' as Tucker liked to call it, _("It's not just a voice Tucker, it's a persona!")_ for the first time that night, having had the tiredness knocked out of him. Literally. At the lessening befuddlement in Mr. Lancer's face as he looked toward him, Phantom continued, "You're not hurt, right?"

Lancer blinked, and then seemed to take stock of himself and his immediate surroundings again, because he answered, "No, your shield seemed to have protected us at just the right time," he replies, but then goes to stand up, and winces when he puts weight on his left foot.

"A bit of a rough landing, though." He admits, and wow, Phantom can actually hear him over the ringing in his ears.

"Yeah, sorry abou-" Danny Phantom stops when his battered ears pick up the sound of rubble and stone shifting. They turn back towards the school, and see the lunch lady ghost, still a meat monster, albeit looking a lot bigger and more charred than the last time he saw her, emerging from the rubble of the ruined school. Danny groans.

"Oh, great." Mr Lancer swallows, looking between Phantom and the lunch lady, who was now drifting towards them. "Yeah, I'm just gonna go alert the principal. We need to...decide what to do now that.." with a weak gesture toward the school, a shake of the head and a muttered swear of, " _Moby Dick.."_ Mr Lancer starts limping in the direction of the parking lot, though Danny doubted that there will be much of one left.

And yeah, Danny doesn't even want to imagine the repercussions of the school _blowing up_ from a ghost attack, other than hoping this means no school at _all._ _(I probably won't be that lucky.)_ Danny Phantom thinks as he fires a couple ecto blasts in the meat monster's direction.

Walking back from her mission to get a stupid autograph, Blow is feeling detached and logical.

When it comes to killing, Blow has become good at lessening her emotions and tamping them down to a manageable level. All she has to do is rationalize and focus on the facts.

The detached feeling is also helpful. The mission hadn't been that bad, really. Getting an autograph signed was embarrassing at the least, but the Stage 4 demon did help get her on Seren's good side. The person the demon was possessing had been beyond saving, as it is with Stage 4. After killing the demon, which used to be a person, it left Blow feeling slightly out of herself and displaced from her body, as well as this need to put things into logical terms.

 _There was no helping him. I had to kill him, to save Seren and all the people nearby. You can't save possessed people that are that far gone._

To pass the time while trudging through the nighttime forest, near some school by now if Blow hasn't diverged from her planned route to get back to Opion under the tree cover, _(honestly, all the attention the Black Magician gets just makes her nervous, she hates crowds)_ Blow goes over the stages of demonic possession as she walks.

 _Stage 1: Has been recently possessed, may be noted by the glowing of the eyes at the first few hours of demonic possession. Recovery still possible._

 _Stage 2: The demon has now been in possession for one day, and has started to corrupt or eat the possessed's soul. Demonic power will materialize in the body, the possessed may begin to attack people. Recovery still possible._

 _Stage 3: The demon has been in the body for two days. Body distortion has begun, and the demon will attack humans if it has not already. Recovery unlikely._

 _Stage 4: Demon has been present three days. Body transformation has begun, the soul of the possessed is corrupted beyond help or devoured. Recovery is impossible, kill on site._

With each stage, Blow felt more in control, the detached feeling slowly dissipating until she felt aware and in control of her body again.

 _I wonder what that feeling was._

Blow stops suddenly, and scans the forestry around her, her sharp eyes and ears picking up normal normal nighttime sounds and no enemies lurking in the undergrowth that she could see, and her night vision is good, with just enough of the moon peeking out through the tree branches to cast everything in a silvery light. She doesn't feel watched, exactly, just the feeling that she wasn't alone.

Blow is prevented from searching the area more thoroughly by the sight of a body flying through the air past her line of sight, landing in a roll with a yell. Blow reaches for her magic, her mana forming her black and dark blue blade with familiarity as her electric blue eyes scan for more enemies.

A snake-tailed monster bursts through the trees, nearly as big as a five floor mansion and its large abdominal muscles holding it upright, arms pushing trees aside easily. Glowing red eyes and a mouth filled with jagged teeth glare out of a large head that swings around clumsily.

Blow reaches out with her magic, fearing another stage 4, but instead senses that it's a...ghost? - _wait, that's a ghost?_ That _?_ \- Gaining a new respect for ghost hunters, Blow turned toward said ghost hunter to check on them, to find them..floating. And glowing, which wouldn't be all that unusual if said ghost hunter had an awakened form, but this looked...different.

Not just the white hair or the green eyes were glowing, his whole _body_ was. _(which was really ruining Blow's night vision.)_

 _Glowing, like a ghost,_ Blow observed, as the white haired kid flew toward the huge ghost with a determined expression on his face, firing green ecto blasts from his hands with the ease of long practice.

 _Okay, not just 'like' a ghost, then,_ Blow concluded calmly, because while magicians can gain a couple of ghost-like abilities upon awakening, such as invisibility or intangibility, firing ecto blasts from your hands instead of a gun is something only ghosts can do.

 _But why are they fighting each other?_

In Blow's limited experience, ghosts only attack people, not fight other ghosts. The ecto blasts blow big chunks of.. charred meat, Blow smells, off of the other ghost. The larger meat ghost makes a grab for the smaller humanoid, but he slides through the air, around and past the grabbing hand, and blasts off the whole arm. Which falls to the ground, and breaks apart into smaller bits of meat.

But as white hair goes to fly out of reach, the blackened meat on the forest floor swirls around to reform into an arm and snags him out of the air. After it reattaches to the main body, the meat ghost looks down on the smaller humanoid and bears it's teeth in an uneven grin. The hand holding the other ghost starts to squeeze.

Hearing the young ghost's cry of pain, Blow makes a decision. She dashes up to the ghost monster and slashes, precise strokes that slice up the arm holding the smaller ghost into ribbons with a wet, meaty sound. The arm falls apart, and Blow catches the falling green-eyed ghost as he falls.

Holding the cold body tightly in her arms, Blow retreats to what she estimates as a safe distance away and sets the ghost boy _(because with a closer inspection he looks to be close to her real age)_ down gently.

"Are you alright?" Blow asks, as if this were just another person she had saved from a demon.

The ghost boy looks up from poking the general area where his ribs would be if he had them, green eyes glowing eerily in the moonlight, and says, "Y'vet. H rfer x jlv rxqalh khrl, vlq H'nn sm oxaq rk x fvoqll exaql."

The ghost boy grimaces, either from pain, or realizing his mistake and says, "Er, I mean, yeah. I'll be fine-"

"In a couple of hours, you said?" Blow interrupts, because she's watching the meat monster, as it's previously carved up arm reforms, more slowly than before, and she formulates a plan for taking it down.

"Can you still fight?" She asks, because even without the supposedly real and broken ribs, the ghost boy is covered with half-healed cuts, his black and white jumpsuit torn and dirty. ( _And Blow's not going to be picky with allies at the moment.)_

"Y'vet. Er, yes, I can," the ghost boy assures her, looking past her standing form at the incoming meat ghost. "The problem is that with all that meat covering her like armour, I can't catch her with _this_." The ghost gestures to something on his hip, but Blow is a bit busy grabbing him by the arm and dodging out of the way of the huge meaty fist that swung down to crush them against the ground to look properly, the ground shaking and forming into a crater with the force of the blow.

"You can leave that to me." Blow says with a confident smile, darting out her hand to touch the meat arm, the planned spell passing her lips. **[Elgira Koraliithe Xlaquiine!]** And with a burst of power that ran all the way through the meat ghost's constructed body, the charred meat ghost fell apart, losing shape, the meat cascading to the ground like a solid black and meaty smelling waterfall.

And then there was nothing left except for a glowing, floating green skinned, pink plaid and apron-wearing lunch lady, who was lifting her arms and waving them about, trying, and failing, _(Blow noted with was satisfied smirk)_ to wear and control the horribly charred meat again.

The ghost boy, floating up in the air above the Lunch Lady, pointed a long cylindrical object at her _(What? Is that a thermos?)_ and remarked, "Ryiie Vxqk, Voqlkxybr'l yojb." And the thermos shot out a sphere of white revolving light, which captured the ghost and sucked it into the thermos.

And then Blow blinked, because ' _Sorry Lady, Lunchtime's over.'_? _(Did he just make a pun?)_ as the ghost boy floated down to her level, capping the thermos.

He looked over toward her and commented, "Nice, uh, spell was it? What did it do? I'm not all that familiar with magic, so," he continued, gesturing towards the thermos in his hand, which, now that Blow got a good look at it, was not magic, as she'd initially assumed, but technology, something that she 'isn't all that familiar with.'

Deciding that an exchange of information was in order, Blow replies, "I'll tell you, if you tell me how that ghost-capturing device works, and.." Blow hesitates, "And your name." because she can't just keep calling him 'ghost boy'.

The green eyes blink, and then suddenly look more guarded, as if he's just now realized something. But he replies, "I'm not sure how the Fenton Thermos works exactly, I didn't invent it, a family of ghost hunters did." A tense shrug. "But I prime it up, and then it shoots out the suction ray that captures the ghosts."

The ghost boy hesitates again, then says, "And my name...it's, uh, Danny. Danny Phantom."

And the ghost boy, Danny Phantom, tenses up as if preparing for an attack, settling into a slight battle ready stance. Deciding to ignore this strange behavior for now, she holds out a hand and says, " Blow, Opion's Magician."

Phantom looks at her hand like it's a poisonous scorpion that tried to sting him. Blow raises an eyebrow.

"Is there a problem?" Phantom, looking uncertain now as well as guarded, cautiously shakes her hand once, his fingers ice cold, and then lets go quickly, as if fearing some sort of infectious disease. _(Which might not be too far off the mark, but still.)_

"Er, I guess not?" Looking a little more at ease, now that nothing has stung/infected him, no doubt, and a little sheepish, Phantom rubs the back of his neck and admits, "I was...expecting you to attack me after you heard my name."

At Blow's look, eyebrows now _both_ raised, he clarifies, "Some...certain magicains are after me. Since you're a magician I figured.."

Blow's confusion clears quickly after that remark, her face smoothing as she says, "Oh, right, I did hear that the Tower started going after more ghosts after allying with the Guys In White." At Phantom's alarmed look, Blow reassured, "Don't worry, though. I work for Opion, not the Tower, and anyway, I eliminate demons, not ghosts. And," Blow adds, the subject of the tower making her want to growl with distaste, "I have no reason to capture you, not when you just protected people from that ghost."

Phantom relaxed, looking a little reassured by that last sentence, and that's when Blow remembered that most ghost hunters, if not all, capture and destroy _(or study, Ugh)_ ghosts for no reason other than them existing. "As for the spell," Blow continues, because she still needs to finish her end of the deal, even not knowing how a ghost would react to this information, "It was a mild ghost protection spell that magicians use, cast on people or objects, that cuts off the ghost's influence on the person or object."

As Phantom looks confused, glancing at the fallen meat, then back at Blow, Blow simplifies, "As an example, say a person gets overshadowed, if you place a spell on that person's body, the ghost won't be able to control it anymore."

 _The ghost will still be trapped inside the body, though. You would need to push the ghost out after that,_ Blow silently adds, not sure how Phantom would take the rest of that scenario. At Phantom's slow nod of understanding, and seeing none of the offense or aversion she would have expected on his face, she decides to ask another question, seeing as how he's acted so _human_ so far.

"So, do you hunt ghosts often?" That and the fact that he's a ghost using a ghost hunting weapon to capture _other ghosts_ invented _by ghost hunters_ are facts that seem a little odd to her, and deserving of questioning.

Phantom sighs and rubs his face tiredly, _(Is he tired? Ghosts can be tired?)_ still floating slightly off the ground. "Y'vet. All the time." He sighs again and says, "I should really get home, though."

He looks up at her, and before she can ask ' _what home?', (like ghosts don't have homes! they must go somewhere when not scaring people!)_ his green eyes are widening as he looks her over for the first time, and stutters out, "Y-you should probably go home, too!"

Then Phantom turns and, without any prior warning, flies off the way he came.

 _(Rude. But then, I guess I can't blame him for getting nervous.)_ Blow looks down at herself, sighing at the blue blood, with hints of red, that is lightly splattered on the front of her black clothing like paint. Smelling the sickly sweet odor of demon's blood, Blow muses that it almost masks the metallic smell of the red, _human_ blood mixed in.

Blow sighs again, and starts walking, her only company the images of the swirling demonic power from that night ripping into everything around it.

When his alarm clock goes off at 6:20 am, Danny is sorely tempted to blast it to bits and go back to sleep. Danny had finally gotten home at 4:12 am, having had to stop by a store and _procure_ some bandages _(he wasn't carrying any money)_ so that when his ribs healed they wouldn't heal crooked.

After reaching inside his own chest with intangibility to set the ribs back in place, _(an experience Danny isn't eager to relive)_ and wrapping them in bandages so they'll stay that way, and the long, painful flight home after that, he'd barely managed to transform back to human and get his binder off before collapsing in bed.

After a while Danny reluctantly gets up and turns off his screaming alarm. Checking his ribs and deciding that they were mostly healed, Danny unwraps the bandages and pulls on the binder, ribs still a bit sore.

Changing into clean clothes and brushing his hair, Danny starts to head downstairs when he remembers: _school! The school got blown up last night! I got up for nothing.._

But, Danny realizes with a groan as he's about to climb back into bed, Danny _Fenton_ wouldn't know about that yet. Danny put his binder back on with a sigh, the hope of snoring the morning away benched. For now. Snagging his phone, Danny sends a quick text to Sam and Tucker:

 **DF: so unfair. the school gets blown up last night and i** _ **still**_ **have to get up for it.**

 **SM: Blown up? Danny r u ok?**

 **TF: woah, rly? u ok, dude? does this mean I can go back to sleep now?**

Danny chuckles sleepily while reassuring Sam and Tucker at the same time as he heads downstairs.

 **DF: yeah, i'm fine, i got out in time. i'll tell you guys the details later.**

Dani is already at the breakfast table when he walks into the kitchen, eating a bowl of sugary cereal. Danny used to like the stuff when he was younger, but now he can't see the appeal.

Danielle, looking up from her cereal, swallows loudly and says, "Hey, brother. You sleep good?"

Danny, sitting down next to his sister, _(it still feels weird calling her that.)_ sets his arms down on the table, and his head in his arms, issuing a long groan in reply. It makes Dani laugh, which is what matters.

"Rough night?" Dani asks, her face looking sympathetic through Danny's bangs. "You know…" Dani begins, as if not sure what to say. She glowers down at her cereal bowl, takes another bite, and then says, "You can tell me anything. You know that, right? I'm your _twin sister_ , I can take it! Whatever it is!"

Danny, feeling too tired for this conversation, mumbles, "Are you sure?" in her general direction.

"Of course I'm-" Dani retorts, but Danny looks up at her and interrupts.

"No, Dani, are you _really_ sure? Because I'm.. I'm just trying to protect you." _And myself, from my own guilty emotions,_ Danny's thoughts supply.

Danielle, looking less sure than before, hesitates before saying, "I'm sure. I need to know. Whatever it is you're hiding from me, I can feel that it's important, as important as those certain abilities that you think I haven't noticed." Dani says, smirking as her brother's mouth drops open from shock.

"What, you think just because sometimes you looked a little different that I wouldn't recognize my own twin? Flying through the sky like a-" as their mother Maddie Fenton walks in, Dani substitutes 'ghost' for 'airplane' in her sentence and stuffs another spoonful of cereal in her mouth. A closed cellphone is in her hand, presumably from just getting off the phone when their mother announces, "I just got a call from the principal, school's out today, kids. Apparently the school got blown up in a ghost attack."

A yell from downstairs in the lab from Jack Fenton, proclaiming, "Yeah! And we're going out and investigating! Would you kiddos like to come along?" Danny gave a quick 'no' and trod purposefully up stairs to his room to get some more sleep. It's not like he's running from Danielle or anything.

Danny dreams of screams, pain in his chest, and melting ectoplasm.

The sound of the alarm he set so he could go meet Sam and Tucker jerking him awake with the urgent thought of _DANI!_

His pounding heart and sudden paranoia making him search the room for the GIW, Danny reassures himself with, _Dani's fine, she's fine now, I_ _ **made**_ _her fine, she's living with us now, has been living with us from the beginning for everyone but me, Sam and Tuck._

'Danny? Are you okay?' Danielle queries inside his head _._

'I'm fine, Danielle, just a bad dream.' he replies, marveling that out of all the things he's had to adjust to over the past year, twin telepathy was one of the easier ones.

When his heartbeat was slow and steady, and after reassuring Dani again, Danny got up to go meet Sam and Tucker.

"You met a magician in the woods behind the school and fought _beside_ her, not _against_ her?" Tucker get's out, looking up from his burger to stare at Danny, a mystified expression on his face. "Didn't she know that the Tower's after you?" Tuck queries confusedly.

"Actually, no, not until I told her." Danny replies. At Tuckers and Sam's horrified expressions- well, Sam's was more of a 'what were you _thinking?_ ' expression- Danny raises his hands in placation, half-eaten Nasty burger still in hand, and says, "I know, _I know_ , but even then, she didn't seem to _care_. She said she works for Opion and that she has no reason to capture me."

At Tucker's and Sam's skeptical expressions, Danny says, "Yeah, right? Seems too good to be true. A magician that _won't_ attack me on sight!"

Which all magicians had, until now. Explaining that he was a good ghost never works, for ghost hunters or low-ranking magicians.

Thinking of the demon's blood he'd seen on her that had spooked him so much _(Nice one, Danny)_ Danny remarks, "And I think she was a pretty high-rank magician, too. Don't magicians have to be rank 2 or higher to be qualified to fight demons?"

Tucker swallows his bite and replies, "Yeah, according to the sparse info on magicians available online. But what makes you think she's high-ranking?" Tucker asks.

"Had she killed a demon earlier that night?" Sam asks, ice in her voice, stabbing at her caesar salad with a dark look.

Danny winces. "Yes. That's initially why I left so quickly."

At Sam's increasingly dark glare and violent actions toward her food, Danny protested, "But think about it, Sam! Demons aren't like ghosts, they don't just _terrorize_ people, they _kill_ them! If ghosts started killing people, what would you want me to do? Just send them back to the ghost zone like before? That works for ghosts, but only because they aren't _killing people_ when they come back!"

After considering things from that angle, Danny had felt horrible for running away like that, judging her without even thinking about the personal consequences of killing demons while they were inside human skin because you had to, to protect people.

 _Would I do the same, in her shoes? Would I have to kill people regularly? Would I be able to?_

Sam's fist slams against the park table that they're eating off of, and she says heatedly, eyes blazing, "I know! But there has to be another way! Something, just not, that! When they kill demons, they're killing people too! We've been over this before!" And into her salad, quieter, "I know."

And there stands the controversy of killing a demon while inside a person's body. From people actively against it, to people that say it has to be done, to those that are for killing demons more than needed, and almost none of them wanting to do it themselves. How being first rate is both a gift and a curse, a gift because you can get more money and recognition that way, and a curse, because only first rate magicians ever kill a person that can't be saved.

"So, what's her name, and what's she look like?" Tuck asked, breaking the tense silence as he starts on his fries.

Danny, taking a few more bites before answering, asked, "Why?"

Tucker snorts, and digs out his PDA. "So I can look her up, of course. If she's rank 2, there must be something about her online."

At his expectant look, Danny sighs and accedes. "Okay, so she was taller than me, short black hair and blue eyes, wearing all black. She said her name was Blow."

Tucker looked up from his PDA to goggle at Danny. "You're _joking._ "

At Danny's blank look, Tuck exclaimed, "You just described the famous Black Magician of Opion that everyone is talking about and wants to meet! _Tell me you're joking._ "

At Danny's confused shake of the head, Tucker groaned and said, "How could you not know? Are you as oblivious as your parents now? She literally has her own fan site! How could you have missed something like that?"

Danny, feeling offended and not knowing quite the source of his offence, said, "In my defence, I live in a family of _scientists_ , Tucker. I'm not sure what mom would do if she found me on the magician forum sites again."

The first time, she had scolded him severely on the ethics of killing demons, the second time, she banned the computer for a week. And the third, well, let's just say that he never mentioned magic or magicians to his parents after that incident. He'd rather not cause another fight. And that had been _years_ ago.

"I'm pretty out of the loop when it comes to _anything_ magical." Danny simplifies.

"Right," Sam says, nodding, including herself in the conversation again, "That whole conflict between magicians and scientists."

 _Yeah,_ Danny thinks. 'That whole conflict' being the ongoing war between scientists and magicians to prove which was superior; science or magic. It never comes to blows or fights in the street, but so far, magic seems to be winning. With technology only permitted in specific 'technology zones', though magic zones can still get cellphones at the least, and with the Tower pretty much running the government at this point, and ghost hunters being disrespected left and right in favor of magicians. _(The oddballs being the GIW, allying with the Tower)_

Danny looks up from his fries and thoughts, hearing the ping of Tucker's PDA go off as he scrolls through the new notification.

Then Tucker is spitting out his mouthful of Cola, Sam exclaims, "Hey, my salad!" as a new dressing is added to it via Tucker's mouth.

Tucker, eyes not leaving his PDA, says, " Uh, guys, you should see this."

"Just spit it out already, Tuck!" Sam snaps irritably.

"Too late for that." Danny says, gesturing towards her newly spat upon salad with a grin, because he just _had_ to.

Tucker turns the screen toward Sam, explaining, "I just now got this notification from the school."

Sam reads the screen, and then, " _Shit,"_ she swears unexpectedly.

Danny's about to ask what's wrong when Tucker turns the PDA screen toward him. And Danny reads:

 _Casper High students will start temporary attendance to Helios, school of magic, starting Monday._

" _Fuck."_ Danny agrees. Danny's parents are _not_ going to be happy about this.

Blow, crouched near the back entrance of the Opion building, reads the sign again with annoyance. ' _If you are not a thief or an animal, please use the front entrance!'_ _(That guy...what's he trying to do, he knows I hate crowds!)_ Blow looks down at herself, still spattered in blue and red blood.

 _There was no where to stop to clean up where I wouldn't be recognized._ Blow laments.

Reading the sign yet again, Blow smirks as a certain loophole comes to mind.

 _I guess he still tries not to think of me in that way._

Blow pauses as something in the depths of her mind stirs, groans, and settles again. Her smirk growing, Blow reaches out and breaks the locks on the door with magic, locks mundane and magical breaking under the force of the magic. Blow enters Opion through the back entrance.

 _If he mentions it, I'll say.. that._

Walking up to the front of Master's desk, Blow slaps a piece of paper on top of it and says, "Here's your autograph."

Master, picking up the autograph, exclaims, "Wow! You actually got it! And I heard Seren was bad-tempered, too. Smells nice." Master sniffs the piece of paper.

Looking at Blow's blood-covered appearance, familiar worry lines appearing on Master's face, he asks, "Ah. Did you run into trouble on your way back?"

"How do you think I got that autograph? She wasn't bad-tempered at all after I saved her from that demon." Smirking in amusement, Blow points, "There's demon's blood on that."

"Ah." Master says, moving the autograph away from his face with a sheepish expression, embarrassed at having been enjoying the smell of demon's blood.

Blow sympathizes _(while still finding it amusing)._ If an inexperienced magician or regular person comes in contact with a demon's blood, they will be enraptured by the smell, and become easy prey for the injured demon. Blow had felt the pull of demon's blood enough times to ignore it, but if you're caught off guard or don't know what it is..

"By the way. How long are you going to stay in that form? Rood?" Master asks.

Blow replies, "Well, thanks to you and these stupid missions I have plenty of Mana."

Readying herself, Blow says, "Your name is **[Blow]** , awakening _remove_."

Feeling the familiar surge of power those words provoke, black and dark blue magic susurrates around Blow, black hair fading into pale blonde, electric blue eyes ceasing to glow and tone changing into a stormy blue color, height shrinking by 16cms until Blow was gone, leaving Rood in her place.

Looking down at himself, Rood hunches up uncomfortably.

Master clears his throat and says gently, "Rood, how about you give your report after cleaning up a bit? It can wait."

Looking up and meeting Master's understanding gaze, Rood nods gratefully and departs from Master's office.

He stops by his room, which is disguised as a utility closet that only he and Master have the keys to. He hops into the shower for a quick wash, watching the demon's blood _(how did it get in his hair?)_ swirl down the drain with a detached feeling.

Out of the shower, Rood puts on his binder with relief, and over it and his boxers and grey undershirt, with a black tee over top and light brown pants.

Back in Master's office and feeling much more comfortable, Rood demands, "Now give me a proper mission!" leaning over Master's desk.

Master, giving Rood a beautific smile that had Rood imagining flowers appearing around his face, said, "But Rood! Delivering Macy's heart-stopping love letter and finding Darcy's lost puppy and so many more are waiting for you!"

He reaches under his desk, and places a large stack of mission requests down on the desk with a thump, no doubt filled with requests like walking dogs, rescuing a kitten from a tree, and searching for a missing earring, all of which Rood had _actually done._

"NO!" Rood says, knocking the ridiculous papers off the desk, where they scattered and fluttered to the ground in a jumble.

"I refuse. I'm tired of doing missions _that don't mean anything._ Give me a serious mission! _Please._ " He added, hoping this might persuade him, feeling a headache coming on wearily.

Master sighs. "Okay, I'll think about it. First give your mission report, please. How'd it go?"

At the very end of Rood reporting on his encounter with Danny Phantom, _(Rood usually goes over his missions with Master before writing the official report)_ Master makes an exclamation of recognition. "Hold on, I think I have a file here." Master gets up from his desk and shuffles around in one of the file shelves in the room, pulling out a thick file folder with a triumphant, "Ah, ha!" and slapping it down on the desk.

"Here, Danny Phantom." Opening the folder, he starts reading the papers there with intensity.

Curious, Rood sidles up to the desk and spots a manilla folder. Snatching it before Master can notice, Rood opens it and reaches inside, feeling smooth square surfaces under his hands. He pulls one out, and sees it's a photograph.

The photo features a creature built out of technology, being punched by Phantom.

 _Must be a ghost,_ Rood thinks, upending the folder onto the desk. There were a lot of photographs, taken from a bunch of different devices, each featuring Phantom.

Phantom fighting and capturing ghosts, Phantom flying through the air, Phantom getting shot at by ghost hunters.

Rood, looking up from the photos, meets Master's eye.

"Apparently he's a fellow celebrity." Master tilts his head toward the photos.

"Lots of people either love the ghost, saying he's a hero, or hate him for being a ghost and wants to capture him. Including the GIW, who have a lot more pull now that they've allied with the Tower. I'm not surprised he didn't stick around."

Rood nods to himself as Master gathers up all of the photos and puts them neatly back into the manilla folder. Putting the file back in it's original spot, Master walks over to start picking up the papers that Rood had knocked over earlier.

"Rood, there is this one mission that is pretty important." Master admits.

"Really?" Rood says, waiting impatiently for more information.

Master looks up from gathering up the scattered papers, and gestures toward them, a silent, 'help me clean up your mess, would you?' in his gesture.

Stifling a sigh, Rood walks over to the fallen papers and bends down, and starts to help pick them up.

"Now, this mission, it's going to be at an auction house, and they're going to be auctioning a certain magical item that's going to attract some unsavory characters." He continues, satisfied with Rood's cooperation.

"Magical object? What is it?" Rood queries, crab-stepping closer to Master to grab more papers when there are no more in his immediate area.

"It's called Freakshow's Shard. It's a-"

" _What?"_ Rood exclaims, head jerking up, forehead hitting Master in the chin, cutting off the rest of what Master was going to say and making Rood see bright lights as his forehead gives a sharp jab of pain.

Rood leans back on his hands, groaning as his head gives a throb of pain, the looming headache making an appearance.

"Rood? Are you okay?!" Rood hears, having closed his eyes before. A gentle hand pushes back his bangs to prod at his forehead worriedly.

After the third well-meaning-yet-annoying poke and the third corresponding throb of pain, this time accompanied by the flash of-something, some image- that Rood immediately forgot afterward, but had him tearing up where the headache hadn't, Rood opens his eyes and pushes the hand away, blinking back the moisture, saying, "Fine, I'm fine! But what was that about Freakshow?"

Master, sitting on the floor next to Rood, retracts his hand, index finger still extended with a weird expression on his face that Rood can't interpret.

"Remember how his crystal ball shattered?" At Rood's nod, remembering the report about the man who controlled ghosts with a crystal ball and ran a circus that was shut down after it was discovered that he was the one making the ghosts steal jewels and money, Master goes on, "Well apparently one of the shards from the crystal ball still retains power. Some genius put it on a chain and sold it as a magic necklace to the auctioneer." Master says bitterly, and Roods mood sours at the thought of that power in somebody's hands.

Standing up and moving away from Rood, papers forgotten on the floor, Master says, turned away from Rood, "Get it? You need to get in there. You know what to do when you get there?" Master queries, looking back at Rood, still on the floor.

"Yes, Master, I think I get what you mean." Rood says, an image of Ms. Ren, scratched up and bloodied from a struggle with a dozen glowing green ghost tattoos entering his mind.

Master smiles sadly, and they share a look of mutual agreement.

Months ago…

Iod Ravus was eating alone in the park, minding his own business, when a strange girl with black hair and yellow eyes, wearing a weird hat with horns attached to it, sat down next to him.

Iod kept chewing, waiting for her to say something, but she just kept looking at him with a piercing stare. After a few minutes of this, the girl sighed and said, "Nothing?"

Iod, thinking this a weird way to start a conversation, asked, "Nothing, what?"

The girl sighed again and said, cryptically, "You're not remembering anything?"

Iod shook his head, confused. "What? have we met before or something?" The girl looked at him, and Iod got the feeling that she was looking _through him_ as well as at him. It made him uneasy.

"Okay," The girl said, reaching up and taking off her hat, "What about now?"

Iod goggled, food forgotten, because there weren't horns attached to her hat, but attached to her _head._ Something twitched in the depths of his subconscious, but Iod squashed it before it could rear its head.

At Iod's increasingly confused look, the girl said, "Strange. With Garmode all it took was to meet and we recognized each other and remembered. With Elzeble, one look at my horns had him running so fast he ran out in the middle of the road and got hit by a car. The subsequent change made him remember… perhaps that is what you need?" The horned girl looked at him speculatively.

Iod, getting nervous, stood up and said, "You know, I don't think I'm very hungry anymore." And started power-walking away, scared and not knowing why.

" _Stop._ You cannot _run._ " And now she sounded pissed off. Some force knocked him off his feet, and Iod was rolling in the grass, to stop by two pairs of shoes.

One pair belonged to a horned girl, and the other to a man in a purple suit and a tattoo near his eye.

The girl said, "Elzeble, we will have to use drastic measures. I cannot understand why they have to be so _difficult._ "

Iod's eyes focused, and he registered two palms held toward him, crackling with yellow and purplish power, before there is a blast of pain in his chest and through his stomach. Iod screamed, and then a cold sensation rushed through him, light blue light enveloped and swirled around his body, images, conversations, _memories_ flashed through his mind as the world shrank around him.

 _I remember now,_ Iod thinks.

 _I'm not a human at all. I never was._

 _I am… a_ _ **demon!**_

Pushing away his false human memories, Iod-Diorook lifts his head and _**roars**_ , wings flaring out and kicking up a strong wind. He looks down at the two small beings on the ground in front of his front claws, -Rubymonter and Elzeble- and says, " **Nice greeting, Rubymonter."**

He really means the opposite of what he just said, because that _hurt_ , dammit, but ever since Diorook was very young, he had learned not to show weakness in front of other demons.

Rubymonter looks up at him and says, "Oh, so you remember. Yes, injuring you enough for you to transform seemed the quickest avenue for getting you to remember."

Diorook cocks his head, wings folding back against his body as he asks, " **And how did I forget?"** Seriously, how did he forget his _real_ life as a demon?

"I am unaware of the specifics, something to do with how we bonded with our human hosts made us all get amnesia and live out lives as human children." Ruby dismisses it calmly with a shrug.

"But, now we can _start._ "


	2. The Auction

Danny Phantom waits in the rafters of the auction house with nervous anticipation, watching the masses of auction goers shifting around on the floor below.

 _It just had to be on a school night,_ Danny grouses to himself, adjusting his weight in his invisible perch on a rafter. _Couldn't they have auctioned the damned thing during the weekend? But now that I think about it, does Helios even have normal weekend breaks like Casper High?_

He's only been going to his temporary school for a few days, and he hasn't had much time for sleep in between reassuring his parents that Helios isn't converting him into a magic supporter and trying to understand what the heck those teachers at Helios are talking about in their classes. When Tucker had told him about the auction tonight, he'd put his face in his hands in defeat. He wasn't going to get any sleep tonight.

 _Damn magicians, can't they leave a freaky power like that alone?_

And now Danny is somewhere without backup _again_ to prevent some horrible person from getting their hands on Freakshow's Shard. He really wishes that Sam and Tucker were here, but two normal teenagers will stick out at an auction like this, and that could get them seriously hurt.

Danny idly wonders if the Black magician is here, listening to the auction with half an ear. _If she is, and is here for the Shard, I'm probably gonna lose all my respect and (albeit shaky) trust of her._

Rood looks down on the auction from the balcony he and Ren are occupying with determination. The auctioneer had just sold some bracelets for a huge price, and now the auction is on to some random necklace, and after that, Rood remembers from the pamphlet, is Freakshow's Shard. Rood feels another iron clad surge of determination and thinks, hands tightening on the railing, _I don't care if I have to sully the Black Magician's reputation to do it. I'm destroying that thing._

"Well? Shouldn't you get ready?" Ren says from beside him, and Rood looks up at her and gives a silent nod.

After pulling the balconies curtains closed and preparing himself, Rood says, "My name is [Blow]. _Awaken!_ " Black and dark blue magic spreads out from Rood's body and surrounds him, and as the awakening begins, Rood reaches out in his magic and makes a slight tweak in the awakening's changes, hoping it'll work, and the magic complies. Rood's hair turns black, his eyes begin to glow an electric blue, and he grows 16cms taller.

Blow looks down at herself, now clothed all in black, and notes that, as per her urging, the awakening had included the change of her binder changing into a bra.

Now as tall as her, Blow looks at Ren, who had been silently watching. "Surprising every time I see it. I've never seen a magician change so much like you do." She says, shaking her head. "How can such a kid change into such a striking young woman?"

"Sorry for being a kid." Blow says, annoyed, as she draws back the curtains.

"Oh my. It was a joke, a joke." Ren defends herself. She clears her throat. "On a more serious note, do you really have to destroy it? I mean, it was so long ago, and just because of…" she trails off, touching a certain area on her neck in an old habit.

Blow looks at the faint but ragged scar on Ren's neck, following it's path down her neck where it disappears under her red dress and letting the memory of where she got it come back to her. "Yes, we do." Blow says, as she remembers.

 _Rood, at age 13, watches the performer tightrope walk with wide eyes. Rood, Ren, and Master are all at Circus Gothica for a little fun after that scare with the demon. Rood was only supposed to be going after ghosts at this point, he's only at about rank 3, but that demon had been going after someone, so she had jumped in and killed it in the end, but not before it had clawed and bitten her a few times._

 _Master swore that Rood's breathing had stopped for over a minute, but Rood isn't sure he believes him, Master always worries too much. But after a 'scare' like that Master had declared that he needed a break from Opion, and Ren had told them about a circus that had come into their area recently._

 _Watching the long limbed person do a handstand on the tightrope, Ren exclaiming in excitement, Master having gone to get cotton candy from a vendor, Rood suddenly has a twinge of pain in his head, his bite wounds throbbing in unison._

{A younger Freakshow, waving his crystal ball in front of a ghost's face, the ghost closing its eyes and shaking its head. " _OBEY ME!"_ Freakshow screams, and the ghost jerks as if a marionette on a string, eyes opening vacantly. The ghost nods absently, and goes to put on a costume.}

 _Rood blinks as the vision leaves him, head aching, to see Ren looking at him worriedly._

" _Rood, are you alright now? You don't look so good. If you need to leave, we can go."_

 _Rood shakes his head, and whispers, " Ren, I think the performers are ghosts being controlled by Freakshow. I don't think they're doing this willingly."_

 _Ren blinks in surprise at this, then her eyes narrow and she questions, "You sensed something?" At Rood's nod, Ren stands up and looks around. "Okay," she says, "I'll go investigate, you wait here and tell Master where I've gone." And she strides off purposefully towards the 'backstage' sign._

 _When Master comes back, cotton candy in hand, and asks where Ren is, Rood doesn't get time to answer. They hear Ren scream. They turn as one toward the noise, and the first thing Rood sees is Ren, on the ground, being attacked by dozens of small, green, animal-like ghosts. A ghost in a red cape with a nose ring and spikes for hair stands over her, eyes staring vacantly._

 _They manage to make it alive out of the circus after that, with no teleportation scroll and two injured people, but not before getting attacked by more ghosts on the way and getting banned from the circus. Rood and Master had unanimously agreed after that that a power like that shouldn't be in anyone's hands._

"And now, ladies and gentlemen, what you've all been waiting for, Freakshow's Shard!" The auctioneer says, revealing the glass case containing a necklace with a red shard of glass attached with a flourish.

But whatever it is he's about to say next is delayed by a group of unsavory looking magicians appearing.

One magician, presumably the leader, puts the auctioneer down with a muttered stun spell. The rest of the group targets the guards, freezing them in place with shouted paralysis spells.

"It's started," Blow remarks to Ren with calmness.

"Shouldn't you get down there? Before they get it before you can?"

"They're small fry," Blow clarifies, "I'm waiting to see who comes to defend it." As much as she might want to stop them, her goal is only slightly morally better than theirs is.

Down below, the leader of the attacking groups of magicians breaks the glass case holding the Shard. Before he can touch it, a brown-haired man with the ears and tail of a wolf grabs his arm, breaking it with a _snap_ that is audible to Blow. A stream of orange-brown power reaches out from the wolf-eared magicians feet, his braid swinging as he kicks the man he was holding back and knocks all of the magicians who were attacking back with a swirl of magic.

Spreading his hands out towards them, the magician intones, " **[umina somnus]** " and brownish magic shoots out from his fingertips and strikes the attacking magicians in their heads, orbiting around them until they all fall over, unconscious.

The Association's magician _(because Blow definitely recognizes him and his uniform now)_ looks at the crowd of onlookers, and addresses them. "I know everyone is very excited about this magic necklace," He gestures toward the Shard, "but I'm asking everyone to please stay calm until the end of the auction. From now on, if anyone touches this necklace, they really won't have a good time with me."

On cue, a red haired magician picks up the necklace out of the broken case and jumps up onto a nearby statue.

Ren exclaims, beside Blow, "Shit, that's..."

"Yeah." Blow says, a faint sigh of annoyance escaping her lips.

"Oi, Blackie! This is your target, too, isn't it? Come and get it! If you don't, this necklace… I'll destroy it."

 _Just destroy it, that's why I'm here!_

"Blow, since that guy is here, maybe we should go." Ren suggests, looking nervous.

"Leave, just because of a flea like him?" Blow replies, just as the statue Shic is perched on is sliced off at the base by a blue-haired woman, and the necklace goes flying out of Shicmuon's hand.

Blow tries following it with her eyes, but it is soon lost in the crowd, so then Blow starts looking for someone acting a bit too casual, scanning body language and… -there. A man with long brown hair and holding two women at his sides.

"I'm off." Blow tells Ren, pulling her hood over her head and jumping off the balcony, landing unharmed at the bottom.

Feeling uncomfortable in the crowd, Blow finds the man easily, and goes through his pockets with intangibility without him even noticing. Not finding it in his pockets, she turns to his belt.

It turns intangible at her touch and his pants fall around his ankles with a soft _whump!_

"Oops."

She hears someone giggling and wonders who is actually childish enough to find this funny.

"Wha- HEY!" He attempts to turn around and grab his belt but falls flat on his face instead. She tosses the belt back to him after retrieving the Shard. He doesn't stir, and she wonders if he actually knocked himself out on the floor or if he's just too embarrassed to move.

The crowd is murmuring around her, and people are _looking_ at her. She starts to sweat, and pulls her hood further down over her face. She needs to get out of here before things escalate.

Blow feels a waft of cool air behind her, and when she turns, she finds herself face to face with Phantom, floating at eye level with his arms crossed over his chest and a stormy expression on his face.

"So, you really are just like the other magicians." He says, eyes locked on the necklace in Blow's hand, and it clicks that maybe a ghost would be the one to actually approve of her mission to destroy the Shard. A ghost who is currently getting the wrong impression about Blow's intentions.

"No, wait! I'm actually-" She feels magic start to charge up behind her and turns to see cloak guy- still kneeling on the ground with his pants around his ankles- gathering his mana into purple orbs, his face twisted in rage.

He's more of an annoyance than anything, but she puts up her mana weapon to block anyway, and the purple blots fly toward her and abruptly explode, which- she really hadn't been expecting, but she should have, because people are idiots.

She'd been braced, so she only slides back a couple of feet, almost right into the ghost boy behind her, and sends out a paralysis spell to stop that guy wearing Ember Mclain underwear, of all things, from embarrassing himself any further.

His head hits the floor with another _smack_ , the girls he'd probably paid to be his arm candy already long gone.

Blow goes to put the necklace in her pocket- and hears the click of a camera phone just as it registers that her hood is no longer covering her head. More and more pictures are being taken all around her, and the pressure of all those eyes on her is suffocating.

 _So I guess that explosion is going to do more damage than I thought…_

"Is it really her? The Black Magician?"

"Of course it's her! Who else could it be?"

The murmur of the crowd grows to a dull roar, and Danny Phantom takes her brief moment of panic as an opportunity to steal the Shard. She snaps out of her stupor just in time to watch a red blur slam into him as he attempts to zip out of the auction house.

The two figures fall to the floor- one much more graceful than the other- not much farther away than Danny had taken off from.

She meets the blazing red eyes of Shicmuon with a grimace as he holds the necklace in his fist and waves it at her tauntingly.

"Found you."

Then he springs at her, and she blocks the sword swinging towards her with her own saber. Shic lets go of the sword, and Blow takes an involuntary step forward from the strength of her earlier block, and the red haired magician darts down and grabs Blow's foot, _(really, he grabbed her foot? that's ridiculous!)_ throwing her through the air.

 _The necklace!_ Blow thinks, as Shicmuon puts it around his neck. Blow's momentum slams her back up against the wall, Shic not far behind, aiming for a punch to the face that Blow dodges. The rest of Shic smashes up against her with a "Hello, Blackie," slipping out of his stupid smirking mouth.

"Hello, my ass!" Blow grunts out, and levers a leg between them, kicking him off and away from her.

Shicmuon goes airborne, and then stops his velocity suddenly and floats in mid-air, looking down at Blow, gesturing at the necklace around his neck with a grin.

 _He's baiting me,_ Blow glances coolly at him in return.

 _But_ , Blow thinks, as she takes a running step and leaps up skyward toward Shicmuon, giving the jump extra power with magic, _Knowing that doesn't mean I can stop myself from reacting._

Shicmuon's trademark triple firing circle appears in front of Blow's path, shooting out red charges at her, knocking her in a different direction. Feeling the sting of magic and the impact of it on her stomach, Blow spots Phantom flying at Shic head-on, trying to grab the Shard, only to have Shicmuon evade him and shoot him down with a blast of bright red from his hand.

Holding out a hand in the direction that she is falling, Blow yells, reaching for her mana, " **[Alohilani Coulter Dyaus]**!" and rebounds off of the spell she'd cast in the space before her hand, compressing the air into a trampoline-like conformation, bouncing back in the direction of Shicmuon with a speed that would be alarming if she didn't have magic to break her fall.

Blow aligns her body into a kick aimed at Shicmuon's face, he catches her foot _again_ , but that doesn't stop her moving, the momentum swinging her around the back of his head to boot the other side of his face with her free foot, leg twisting painfully in his grip.

Shic lets go and plummets down towards the floor. Blow is nearly to the ground herself when a very pissed off ghost boy crashes into her, sending them both soaring sideways. He punches her in the jaw, and Blow sees white.

He yells, "H yln'v qct ukv phf rtj erhkzflx!" ' _I won't let you get the necklace!'_

With a burst of black and blue magic Blow propels him away from her, saying, "I don't want it!"

Blow lands on the floor with a slight skid, knocking a few people out of her path with muttered 'sorrys'. She scans the crowd for Shic, and finds him hovering slightly above the crowd. Blow breaks through and finds a gap in the crowd, which she gratefully runs through.

Shicmuon's red magic circles appear above his head, but Blow is ready for that. She turns herself intangible and keeps running as the red X's in the firing circles fire a barrage of projectiles that go right through her intangible form, using magic to propel herself as fast as she can.

A cold body slams into her and makes her trajectory slightly crooked, and she nearly sinks through the floor to her death in surprise. She looks at him sharply, and realizes he must also be intangible.

"Like _hell_ you don't want it!" Phantom yells, as he goes to kick her in the stomach. Blow turns tangible again, so that the still intangible ghost passes right through her, feet leaving long friction marks with the force of her skid across the floor. He turns tangible again to fire green ectoblasts at her from his hands, and Blow recoils to the side, and slashes out at Phantom with a sweep of black magic that sends him colliding with the wall.

Sensing Shicmuon behind her, Blow blocks his attack with her saber and reaches out and grabs for the necklace around his neck. Green ecto rays hitting them both from the direction of Phantom prevents her from grasping it, pain shooting into her side as the two of them are blasted away, flying quite a distance before landing to skate across the floor.

Blow starts to gather her magic to stop her momentum, only to have it all drain away from her reach.

 _What the-?_

Blow looks down at Shicmuon, half on top of him and still sliding with a bored expression on his face, his eyebrow raising and mouth smirking as their eyes meet. _Bastard,_ Blow thinks, going to grab the necklace around his neck, only to have it glow pinkish-purple and vanish before her hand can get close.

Hearing more ectoblasts being fired, Blow rolls to the side, momentum of the skid nearly gone, as the floor where she and Shic had been just a second ago gets blasted to bits.

Phantom, floating above them, looks at Shic and demands, "Where's the Shard?!"

Blow, standing, states, "It disappeared." Hearing a _ztt_ behind her, Blow looks and sees a pinkish purple summoning circle with a zig-zagging design inside on the ground.

 _What now?_ A demon emerges from it, form susurrating out of the circle to whing at Blow, she puts up a barrier around herself right before it's insubstantial body slams into her, blocking it from possessing her, it's incorporeal mouth opening as it bares pointy teeth to scream in frustration. Stabbing at it with her magic, Blow sends it back where it came from with a word.

Hearing a shriek, Blow glances over and sees Phantom, somehow physically grappling with the wispy form of a demon while it attempts to possess him, pummeling it with ectoblasts to no effect.

Blow runs over and repels it with a gust of magic, and latching onto it's airy form with tendrils of black, Blow utters, " **[Hlinka Kulya]** ", and watches detachedly as the demon bursts into flames with an inhuman scream, and evaporates into nothing.

Phantom, standing with a grunt, "I didn't need _your_ help!" he retorts.

Blow raises and eyebrow. "Really? It sure looked like you needed _somebody's_ help."

"Well, I don't _want_ help from someone who was trying to obtain Freakshow's power!" He clarifies angrily.

Blow sighs, feeling a headache coming on. "Yes, I was trying to get the Shard. But not to _use_ it. My mission was to _destroy_ it." _I finally said it,_ Blow thinks.

Phantom's eyes widen, and he begins, "Wha-" when the roar of Shicmuon's magic interrupts them again, Blow looks and sees Shic standing 10 feet away, his firing circles priming up for another shot.

Before he can fire, though, the wolf-eared Association member grabs him from behind in a chokehold, saying, "Shic, stop it already! The mission is ruined, we need to get back before those annoying guys from the Tower get here!"

Shic slams the back of his head into the man's face, and Van lets go to hold his nose, the firing circles charging up again.

"I'm sick of this!" Danny Phantom yells, and grabs Blow by the shoulders to turn her intangible and let them both sink through the floor, Blow barely seeing Shicmuon's incensed face before she holds her breath and gets dragged under.

When they reemerge from being inside the floor, Shic and Van nowhere in sight, Blow gets out, "Give me a bit of a - warning next time please! - I'm not a ghost, I still need to conserve oxygen," in between gasping for breath.

"Oh, sorry. I guess you could say I… Took your breath away!" Phantom says, looking way too proud of himself.

He deflates slightly when all he gets from her is a glare.

When Blow gets her breath back, Phantom requests, "Explain, please."

Blow, straightening, says, "I and the person who assigned me this mission had a rather bad experience with Freakshow's crystal ball. When we heard of it's remnants being auctioned here, we agreed it needed to be destroyed." Just enough information to explain her motives without exposing the identities of the people in question.

Phantom blinks, processing the information, looks relieved, and then apologetic. "Oh. We had the same goal all along then… Sorry for attacking you?" At Blow's forgiving nod, he asks, "And the necklace? You said it disappeared… what exactly does that mean?"

Blow thinks for a moment, then says, "My guess? Someone teleported it to them." _Maybe the same person who summoned these demons_ , Blow thinks.

Hearing screams nearby, Blow looks and sees a possessed person, blue eyes glowing and light blonde hair in disarray, lashing out with the demonic power lingering around them.

Blow dashes into the fray, Phantom right behind her. But something is off about this, because the possession is already at stage 2, and that should be impossible.

Knocking the person off his feet with an explosion of black and blue, Blow holds the possessed to the ground with coils of magic, blocking the miasma of power that strikes out at her, and places a hand on the person's chest and says, " **[Levia Eagan]** " blue and black power surging from her hand and into the person, the demon being purged from his body with a _woosh_ , emerging from his nose and mouth to fly at Blow.

Blow pierces it with her saber. " **[keahi]**!" feeling her mana swell as the demon catches fire and burns a bright blue before dissipating into nothing.

Blow looks down at the person she had saved, asking, "Are you alright?"

The blonde looks up from hugging himself to inquire, "W-what was that? It was like I was trapped in a dark space, something eating at me, not being able to sense anything..." He shivered.

"You were possessed." At the blond's alarmed look, she consoles, "Don't worry, you were at stage 2, so there shouldn't be any long lasting effects. Though, just in case, you should probably see a magician who can look at your soul for you."

The blond nods, seeming reassured, then looks up at the sound of a voice, shouting, "Young Master!"

"Rune!" The young noble says, standing and looking relieved. "Thank you so much for saving me, Black Magician-nim!" The blond thanks Blow, bowing.

"No problem." She replies as he turns and rushes over to a mint green-haired girl.

Blow turns to Phantom, who had been hovering nearby, and is about to say something when she hears her own name being called.

She turns to see Ren running toward her. "Ren? I thought you'd gone ahead of me?!"

"I can't just leave you while you're fighting! What if you got hurt?" she responds, grabbing onto Blow's arm. Looking over at Danny hovering next to Blow, Ren says, dark orange eyes narrowing in suspicion, "Hey! Weren't you fighting _against_ Blow earlier?"

"Er-"

"Just a misunderstanding," Blow intervenes, stopping Ren preemptively. "Ren, meet Danny Phantom. Phantom, this is Ren Bastola."

"Nice to meet you," Ren says shortly, and after Phantom's greeting turns back to Blow. "That said, what's with these demons appearing? I came along thinking it wouldn't be dangerous, but. It's a good thing I brought this."

Reaching into her pocket, Ren pulls out a teleportation scroll, and it begins to hover over her hand.

"Wait, Ren," Blow protests, listening to the screams and general chaos of the crowd, "We can't just leave! There are still demons here, I need to help the people still possessed!"

Ren shakes her head, saying, "The Tower magicians can take care of that when they get here. For now, we need to get out of here."

"Okay," Blow accedes, seeing her point about not being around when the Tower gets here, but still not liking it.

"Phantom," Looking at the ghost nearby, who looks back questioningly, "For helping me escape earlier. How about we leave here together?"

The ghost is looking pretty beat from the fight earlier, and Blow doesn't want him to get caught when the Tower gets here.

"Really? I was just going to fly out of here, but if you have some sort of convenient way out of here, that'd be great."

Blow nods. "Yeah, a teleportation scroll." At Phantom's raised eyebrows Blow elaborates, "Just what it sounds like."

"The condition is [who I touch.]"

Blow holds out her free arm and says, "Hold on."

As Phantom touches her arm tentatively, a crash alerts them to Shicmuon flying toward them.

"You're running away? What happened to that arrogance from before? You're-" A brown blur slams into Shic that resolves itself into Van of the Association, holding onto Shicmuon by the neck.

It slows him down enough for Ren to say, "What I want is… [teleportation!]"

"Interesting." Gamode says, watching as the faraway building explodes with a resounding red _boom_ , the shockwave not quite reaching them from their perch in a tree. "Don't you think so? Rubymonter-nim?" Gamode asks, finned ears twitching as the demon on his shoulder reaches out immaterial tentacles to start playing with his hair.

"How dull." Ruby replies, not even looking up from the page she's reading.

"Just because of this thing," holding up the necklace in her hand, "They're so noisy. Lowly things. However," Looking up from her book and putting it down, still open, on her lap, she continues, "Something as disgusting as this… might be the reason [that person] pointed this place out to us. I suppose... I will have to bear it."

There is an unspoken ' _for now,'_ in her voice as she unhooks the necklace, pulls back her black hair, and puts it around her own neck, re- hooking it with a sigh.

"By the way, what is that you're reading?" He asks her, still paying more attention to the cute little demon that is now attempting to braid his pink hair.

"Oh, just a book written by humans about demons." At Gamode's raised earfins, she continues, "These humans seem to think they know everything there is to know about these 'stages' of demon possession, but they never mention the 'stage' we went through. And they don't know a thing about the method for speeding up these 'stages' either." She says with a smirk, and looks down to examine the necklace.

The bright red shard is cold against her chest, and the swirling red magic in the depths of the glass is slightly hypnotic even to her.


	3. Hate and Sadness

"Have you heard?" Tuck asks as he plops down in his stool seat with a plate of fries. Note, he didn't slide into the seat as it wasn't a bench attached to the table, and he was bearing a plate, not a tray. Add to that the fact that the table they're sitting at is only big enough for five people, it would hardly feel like a cafeteria at all if it weren't for the other tables like this one scattered about and the loud chatter of the other people in the room.

"Maybe," Sam replies, looking mildly interested.

"Heard about what?"

"Clueless as ever I see." Tucker jokes, shaking his head at Danny as if in sad remorse. Eating a few fries, Tuck questions Sam more seriously, "What have you heard?"

"Um." Sam pauses for a second, thinking, and then says, "I think something about a new kid coming today?"

Tuck points at her, exclaiming, "Yeah! The whole school is gossiping about this kid! My sources say he's the first perfect scorer on Helio's entrance exam. Maybe he's a nerd?"

"I'm not sure this school has nerds." At least it doesn't have band geeks or jocks. Danny still doesn't really understand this school's social structure at all. Something about Hereis, Klad, and Idun, but that doesn't tell him where he stands in the hierarchy.

"Shouldn't he have gone to school a month ago like the other Idun?" Sam apparently understands the social classes better than Danny.

Tuck nods in agreement, saying, "Yeah, but apparently he's late due to recovering from some sort of chronic illness."

Danny blinks out of his thoughts, asking, "What kind of illness does he have?"

"Not sure," Tuck replies, finishing the rest of his fries in a huge mouthful and wiping his hands on his pants, ignoring Sam's reproving look. "There's no certain information about what type of illness it is."

Sam snorts and looks slightly suspicious at this. "Sounds like an excuse to me."

Tuck just shrugs at that, and looking at Danny he adds, "There's another rumor that he might be transgender."

At Danny's perked interest, his mind now solely focused on the conversation with a laser intensity, Tuck says, "Not as certain as the rest of the information, more the ghost of a rumor than anything, but it's a possibility." Danny nods, smiling at the stealth pun but now interested in the new guy coming today.

Sam, looking at the clock on her phone, says, "Woah, time for class guys. Let's get moving."

"And hope we don't get lost again!" Tuck jokes light-heartedly, as they stand to go, kitchenware in hand, even though getting lost in Helio's confusing halls is a _very_ real possibility for them right now.

Looking slightly nervous, the new kid introduces himself at the front of the classroom, stormy blue eyes flitting around the classroom as he says, "My name is Rood Chrishi. Please take care of me."

As professor Heil introduces him further, Danny wonders if the new kid really is trans.

As Professor Heil points Chrishi to a seat directly behind Danny, and as the blond walks past the rows of desks to the indicated spot, ignoring the ruckus of the students, Danny observes that he is small and slight. Shorter than Danny, maybe younger. He is stopped from musing further as Rood walks past his seat, and Danny suddenly feels as if a cold weight had settled on his chest, and he gasps, his breath coming out in a cold fog.

 _Ghost sense._

As Chrishi settles in behind him, Danny is on high alert, his senses trained for a ghost to appear, the clamour of the class becoming heightened and yet distant. Both Sam and Tucker notice Danny's reaction, and tense up as well.

When a ghost fails to show up in the next five minutes, Danny hesitantly lets down his guard, shaking his head at Sam and Tuck when they look over at him for confirmation.

 _Not again. Is my ghost sense going to continue to act up for no reason?_

This had happened before. Mostly just recently, but Danny's ghost sense had gone off for a minute and a half when he first entered the school, and now goes off at the most random of times, but then a ghost never appears.

Danny continues to ponder this during the rest of the day, not quite able to get himself to focus on the confusing classes after that. He does look up when a blue-haired boy goes up to the crowded around Rood Chrishi and announces that he has been given the duty of showing him around today. The boy looks over at Danny and says, "The Caspers too. Since you guys are always getting lost." He sounds vaguely unhappy about that, but smiles anyway, orange eyes moving to include the other Casper High students in Professor Heil's class, Sam, Tucker, and Qwan, easily picked out by being the only people not wearing the Helios uniform.

Blue-haired guy, or Dio Varus as he introduces himself, shepherds them all into a vast library, talking about soundproofing and mana stones and paying the most attention to Rood Chrishi out of all of them. That's mostly alright with Danny, he's a little miffed that Dio obviously prefers Rood over the Caspers, but he'd rather get home to talk to Sam and Tuck privately about what had happened today than get angry about that.

Danny is knocked out of his drifting thoughts as a voice calls out from above, "Hey, you with dark blue hair- hi? You… are in Professor Heil's class, right?"

They all look up, and see a tall guy with a gold insignia on his shoulder, dark gold hair spilling down his shoulders as he leans on the railing to look down below at them, two more people at either side, one with a gold insignia on her shoulder, another with blue on his.

"...Ye… yes, sir…! I am…" Dio answers, clearly very nervous.

"Yeah, I think I've seen you before. So how is...the [monster]...from your class doing?" Gold hair asks, smile never leaving his face, but gold eyes narrowing slightly and gaze becoming cold.

"He's, he's doing well." Dio replies, rubbing the back of his head and looking even more tense.

"Really? That's a shame. Then, continue with your business." And gold hair and his two followers turn and leave their sight from the upper balcony, and Dio exhales shakily, all the tension leaving him.

"Why are you so tense?" Rood queries, and as Dio explains to them all just why he was so wound up, in a pretty dramatic way in Danny's opinion, grabbing Rood's shoulders like that, Danny ponders that even in a strange school like this one, bullying still occurs.

Rood is a little irritated right now. After persuading the lady at the desk to give him a room with Lidusis, getting a warning from a Klad not to involve himself with Lidusis, and being shunned by everyone but Dio for even attempting to get close to him, Rood had decided he needed more information about what happened during the incident in the library.

The best source for that information, however, is currently running away from Rood as if he were a stage 4 demon or something.

After he started running Rood had chased after him, and the subsequent burn and chafing around his chest from his binder, which he _really_ should not be running in, is not helping his mood in the slightest. Breathing labored slightly, he reaches out to grab the back of Lidusis's shirt, only to have Lidusis suddenly speed up on him, the mana stones he was carrying going flying out of the basket. _Magic,_ Rood thinks, _he used magic to speed himself up._

Rood is knocked out of his thoughts by a flying mana stone smacking him in the forehead.

"Ow. fuck!" Rood exclaims, stopping to clutch at his throbbing head, hoping that a headache won't form.

Lidusis stops at a railing at the end of the hall they were running down. After a long pause he says, "...sorry."

Rood looks up at Lidusis from holding his head and inquires, slightly annoyed,

"What? Sorry? If you're sorry, then stop running away. Why are you even running in the first place?"

Lidusis's head tips down slightly, he's perhaps looking at Rood, it's hard to tell with that long light grey hair covering his eyes, "Because...you're chasing me."

Rood, eyebrows furrowing and annoyance growing, says, "Ha! And who's the one who started running first? _You._ "

Lidusis, looking down even more, grey hair swinging slightly out of his eyes and the longer parts falling down his neck, purple eyes looking sad and desolate, he murmurs, "That's because you called my name. If you get close to me... bad things... would happen to you, too…" Rood supposes a normal person's hearing wouldn't be able to pick up all that murmuring, but Rood can hear him just fine.

Lidusis starts to turn to look over the rail, but Rood advances toward him, feeling his irritation lessen slightly at the bewildered and sad expressions warring on his downturned face. "Oh, really? Bad things, huh." Rood, saying the words, 'bad things' in a bored tone that hides his curiosity that someone could think 'bad things' would happen just from people being around him.

 _What has this kid's life been like?_

Rood wonders, as he continues forward, stopping to stand in front of Lidusis, looking up at his face with a hand on one hip, "But isn't that my choice to make, Lidusis? Just what sort of-" Rood cuts himself off when a golden haired guy jumps upon the railing behind Lidusis, looking cocky and irritated.

His golden eyes flash as he says, "Hey Idun, what are you doing, talking to this _monster._ "

On the word 'monster' he kicks Lidusis in the back with enough force to send him falling to his knees, the mana stones he was carrying tumbling out of Lidusis's hands as he catches himself on them. Rood dodges out of the way of Lidusis's body, then grabs Chevel's outstretched foot and pushes him backwards.

Not bothering to watch him fall, Rood helps Lidusis to stand, heaving him to his feet with a hand up, asking, "Are you okay?" At Lidusis's nod, Rood continues, "C'mon, let's get out of here and go somewhere quieter."

Chevel jumps back onto the railing and grabs Rood's arm. "Do you have a death wish, Idun brat?" He looks supremely pissed off.

They talk back and forth some more, and Rood is unimpressed when Chevel gets more and more pissed off, though he is a little embarrassed that he couldn't remember Chevel's full name, it makes for a good insult which is a plus.

But then things start to get a little out of hand. Chevel calls out someone's name, a mana stone is thrown and caught, and after spouting off some more Chevel starts to chant. " **Lama, El. Crus. Phel. Mericanu.** "

 _A magical enchant,_ Rood thinks, _but what kind of great magic is he trying to practice by amplifying his mana so much? That aside, fighting back might turn out badly, but I don't think a professor is coming at this rate…_

Rood glances over at Lidusis, trying to see what he is thinking, just in time for him to step forward in front of Rood, saying, "I told you… I told you bad things would happen if you got close to me. Run. I'll do something about this."

 _What… can he do?_ Rood wonders, watching Lidusis's shoulders tense up.

Chevel is smiling in something that is the opposite of happiness, hand still gripped around the mana crystal necklace that is currently emitting a wispy light blue magic, says, "Ha! What a great spectacle! I guess time's really gone by..! Seeing as how you're saying something like _that_ in front of me…! Or have you become confused about your place just because a brat's given you a bit of attention, you _monster!_ "

Leaping from the railing, Chevel's outstretched hand meets Lidusis's face, his momentum bringing them both to the floor.

Chevel, kneeling, snarls, " _What I want is_ _**an endless nightmare**_. I'll show you… hell…!" Standing over Lidusis, as Chevel stands up, Rood crouches on the floor beside where Lidusis's head had fallen, and Rood sees his eyes, revealed by the unruly fall of his hair, are glowing faintly blue.

He seems to be seeing something, because he cries, "Ibriel? Ibriel no. Ibriel, wait!"

Rood, brushing the hair back from his forehead to get a better look at his eyes, his magic bracelet clanging faintly against the side of his head, thinks, _illusion magic?_

He turns to look up at Chevel, who is looking down at Lidusis with an unreadable expression. Rood demands, "What have you done? What are you showing him?!"

Lidusis is yelling now, "No! Stop! STOP IT!" his face is an agony of pain, tears rolling out of the corners of his eyes and down the sides of his face.

Chevel replies, still wearing that blank expression, "What. I just thought the monster's forgotten his crime. _what he did._ " And his face twists in a mixture of hate and grief.

Rood's head suddenly twinges, and then throbs, and Rood struggles to focus on Chevel.

"So. _I reminded him._ " He adds, voice full of rage on those last words.

 _What he did…?_ Rood's mind drifts, his head gives another throb, and he fights to focus as his vision goes blurry, to stay in the present. but suddenly he is holding his head, feeling as if it is splitting open as he hears voices exclaiming faintly from a distance, his head hurts, _it hurts_ , _it hurts it hurts it feels like it's_ _ **cracking**_ and Rood can no longer stay upright, he collapses on top of something, he hears more voices, sounding concerned and alarmed, so distant as to be whispering, his head _**breaks open**_ and he sees-

 _A golden haired and eyed girl is holding a flower, eyes half closed as she laughs, his chest flutters happily. The child sniffs the flower, and then a dark energy twines from the flower in the girl's hand up into the her instead. The little girl jerks abruptly as a new tenant enters her body, golden eyes opening fully and glowing eerily. Her mouth opens._

" _Li-li-du-sis?" The mouth seems to be having trouble forming words._

" _Yes, Ibriel?"_

 _The little girl's eyes stop glowing and her body hunches over, a demonic aura bursting out of the girl's body as her delicate mouth breaks open at the edges, blood spilling from the torn skin as it becomes filled with too many sharp sharp teeth. Body distorting further as he watches in stunned horror, the golden-haired girl pounces, and he feels pain in his arm as she rips into it. He shouts, "Ibriel? Ibriel no. Ibriel, wait!" His body rapidly goes numb, and_ _**.Red.**_

Rood wakes up with a gasp. His heart is pounding and he feels dizzy and disoriented. He sits up with a groan, holding his still aching head, wondering, _what was that?_ Rood knew that he occasionally got brief glimpses of things with his headaches, but there's only been one other time where it had been that clear, and that had been years ago.

He knew it wasn't a dream, knew it with instincts he cannot ignore that it had been something that had truly happened. _But to who?_ Rood thinks, and suddenly registers that he's in a bed of some sort, and there is a woman holding out a cup of water to him and a couple of pain pills.

 _Nurse's station?_ Rood connects blearily, seeing the two white hospital cots beside the one he is currently in, one of them occupied by a sleeping patient with grey hair. Rood takes the pills after the nurse explains that they had called his guardian about what to do about his 'illness' and that he had recommended and given permission for painkillers. Rood, his mind quickly clearing, asks how long he'd been passed out. The nurse replies that it's only been a few hours, and that if Rood's feeling better can he please go meet with Professor Heil on the matter of some rumors going around the school.

Rood gets up to go, wincing slightly and reflecting that sleeping in his binder, even if he had only been out for a few hours, had not been the best option. Not that he had chosen to pass out suddenly. Even so, the slight soreness and chafing was going to affect his mood.

After lying his way out of get punishment in the meeting with Professor Heil, _(Which had been rather easy, considering some of the other experiences Rood's had, it almost seemed like the Professor didn't want to be bothered with the matter)_ and delivering the letters from Ben to his sister Lyn, staying long enough to hear her delighted cry through the wall with a small smile, Rood was walking through the halls back toward the nurse's station to talk to Lidusis, contemplative.

 _Between Chevel and Lidusis, something happened._

A flash of memory, Rood's hand on Lidusis's forehead, bracelet enmeshed with his long grey bangs, Lidusis saying, ' _Ibriel? Ibriel no! Ibriel, wait!'_ another flash, this time in a young child's perspective, as a little golden-haired girl goes through all four stages of demonic possession in seconds, a child's scream, ' _Ibriel? Ibriel no! Ibriel, wait!'_

Rood stops in his tracks. _Golden-haired? And her eyes were too, just like…_ Rood swallows, feeling a sick feeling coiling in his gut.

"Rood!"

Rood sees Dio running towards him. Dio stops before him, his dark orange eyes searching Rood up and down twice, the ruby coloring encircling his pupils glittering slightly as Dio grabs him by the shoulders.

"You're okay?"

"Why wouldn't I be?"

And after Dio explains about the rumors going around school, Rood supposes it might be okay to be a little concerned.

"C'mon, let's go."

"Go where?" Dio queries, but still following when Rood starts walking.

"To Lidusis. I'll explain on the way." And Rood does, the whole incident with Chevel, leaving out his own headache/ vision and stay at the nurse's station, no need to worry Dio more.

"Illusion magic?" Dio asks, looking slightly worried on Lidusis's behalf. "What did he see?"

"I don't know." Rood states, _not for sure anyway._ "Even with magic, reading a person's mind is mostly impossible, though you can implant something into someone's head or make them see past memories, you still can't see directly into a person's thoughts, which you'd know if you studied."

Dio groans and complains at this, and the rest of the walk is spent in companionable silence.

And when Lidusis cannot be found at the nurse's station, Rood knows where to look next. Amidst the darkness and clutter of the storage room, Rood walks forward toward where Lidusis is huddled.

"What are you doing here alone, sitting in the dark?" Rood opens with this, hoping that Lidusis might feel like talking about what he saw in the illusion. When this is met only with silence, Rood sighs and sits down on one of the boxes next to the box Lidusis is huddled behind.

"Fine, we've got time. Let's talk." Rood decides to get to the point here. "I doubt the rumor of you turning into a monster is true. What's the reason you're being called a monster? And…" Rood pauses, but the nauseas feeling writhing in his stomach will not abate, so he adds, "And, who's Ibriel?"

Lidusis jerks to look at him at the name, his face an awful mixture of pain, loss, sadness, and hate.

"How…?"

Rood decides to go with a half truth at this question. "While under the illusion magic, you said, 'Ibriel.' So I was wondering who they were." While he did get the name from that, he'd gotten a lot more from that vision he'd had earlier.

Lidusis looks away from him, and hunches up further.

He grates out, strong emotion in his voice, "Who she was...what happened. It- it doesn't concern you, It doesn't concern you at all! So just, just leave me alone-!" His voice breaks off at a sob at this last sentence, and Rood sees shining wetness run down Lidusis's cheeks.

Rood feels clashing emotions of anger and pity at this last request, because he obviously shouldn't be left alone right now.

Rood states, "So you're just going to live hearing others call you a monster, feeling like-" reaching over sideways, Rood brushes a crooked index finger under one of the teartracks on his face, Lidusis stilling at the touch, "-this?" Holding up the teardrop he'd gathered in front of Lidusis's line of sight, the light from the open doorway reflecting off of the beaded moisture on Rood's finger.

"Yes." Lidusis affirms, voice choked with tears. "I deserve it, I deserve everything he does to me. Since… I'm a monster."

The sadness and despair in his voice lingers in Rood's mind even after he's left, and he wonders how he can ever fix something like depression and self-hatred. He could just attempt to become his friend even more, but just being with a friend can't always fix depression. He needs some sort of anti-depression medication and to see a therapist, but Rood isn't sure he wants to recommend those for fear of making the duchess feel like he is insulting her son, which is not his intention at all.

And how can he ever fix what he suspects happened between Chevel's sister and Lidusis? The cause of Chevel's bullying is obviously that, if Rood is right, but how can he make right something like that? Rood isn't a therapist, and he isn't very good with feelings, his own or the feelings of others, but he supposes he'll have to try.

 _Because if what I think happened really happened, this is a lot more complicated than just beating up the bullies, and I can't just ignore someone's pain and sadness. Now think. What can I do to resolve this?_

 _Lidusis dreams…_

 _Ibriel, leaping onto him, her burst open mouth biting into his arm and ripping, Lidusis cries out in pain, yelling Ibriel's name. The aura of blackness clinging to her body slashes out at him with oily tendrils and finds flesh. A numbness spreads out from Lidusis's chest and to the rest of his body, until Lidusis can barely feel it at all. He can feel his body moving distantly, as if from far away, Lidusis can't see, can't hear, but he remembers what happens next._

 _ **No! Stop! STOP IT!**_ _He orders, begs, but when Lidusis sees again, the first thing he sees is Ibriel's body, covered in blood and with a spreading pool of red around her, with her throat torn out and intestines spooled out of her stomach and onto the red-stained grass. Lidusis swallows, eyes filling with tears, and tastes blood in his mouth, suddenly registers it down his face, he lifts up a shaking hand to see it covered in crimson and feels wetness under his torn and ragged nails._

' _Monster!' He hears Chevel scream, accuse, name him._ ' _ **MONSTER!'**_

Lidusis's eyes snap open, and he jerks up in bed, registering a phantom metallic taste in his mouth. He looks at his hands, but they're clean and unmarred with blood.

' _You know that's not true.'_ Says a voice in his head. ' _Just because you can't see the blood, it doesn't mean that it won't always be there.'_ it continues.

Lidusis becomes aware of the embers of self-loathing burning smokily in his chest, as well as a heavy, murky sadness coiled up in another area of his chest, feeling like a physical weight pressing down, pulling and wrenching at him, making his throat close up and his eyes heavy and teary. And his self-hate…

' _Monster, monster!'_ the voice sings. ' _You're a monster, you're a terrible person.'_

Lidusis closes his eyes and opens them again, swallowing thickly.

 _Just hold it in. It doesn't matter how I feel. Because…_

' _You're a monster!'_ the voice supplies for him, ' _It's all your fault. All yours.'_

Lidusis nods to himself, his throat closing up and his eyes blurring with tears. He shuts his eyes and swallows the tears down resolutely.

' _You killed her. You killed someone you considered a friend, a sister even! You deserve to suffer. You don't deserve things like happiness or friends.'_

An image of a short blond boy flashes through his mind. _Rood…_

' _Don't be silly.'_ the voice interrupts, ' _if you get involved with him, he'll just end up getting hurt. Because you… are a monster. And anything bad that happens is all your fault.'_

Lidusis opens his eyes, blinks back the tears, and leaves the nurse's station for somewhere darker, quieter, where no one can hear him if he cries. It's better that way.

Danny Phantom, in the kitchen at home, transforms back to human form with relief and watches as Mr. Lancer morphs into the faceless form of Amorpho, his glasses the only thing giving definition to his face.

"I'm sorry for all the trouble I've caused. All I wanted was a little attention."

Danny sighs and nods, too drained to really even be irritated. "Well, I forgive you, and as long as you stay out of Amity Park, I'll leave you alone."

Amorpho phases through the ceiling after turning into a copy of Danny Phantom, leaving his last rather chilling remark, "Oh, I will. But… how will you ever know?"

As Danny's parents rush in, and he is bombarded by their love and support, he reflects that at least with the whole Amorpho thing going on he'd missed most of the Helios school day. He just hopes nothing too earth-shattering happened while he was gone.


	4. AN

**Hey, sorry this isn't a new chapter, this is an author's note, sorry. Just wanted to say that I'm not dead, but that this series is going under** _ **serious revisions.**_

 **And by** _ **serious**_ **I mean so far it's a complete rewrite, the story is completely different and there's really no way to incorporate what's already here into the new plot so far.**

 **Some aspects and concepts will be the same, but a lot is going to be different from the very start.**

 **Why am I doing this, you ask? Well you may have noticed that I haven't updated this in quite a while, and the reason is this: I hated this story.**

 **I hated it for quite a while, and since I'm writing for my own enjoyment and practice if I wasn't enjoying writing the story anymore, there was no reason to continue.**

 **But after a time, I started to think about all the people that liked this story and about letting them down by dropping this story, so I hesitated. I started to reluctantly think of ways to make myself like the story again, try to pin down and change what I didn't like.**

 **And then boom! Inspiration struck, and I have motivation for this story again, and even like it so far, or at least this crossover, even if it is a completely different story.**

 **I have a question for you readers now, though, on Ao3 and FFN, and it's this: do you like this previous story enough that you want the previous chapters to stay up, and for me to either post in a completely different work and point people toward the rewrite, or take down the previous chapters and start over in the same work?**

 **If I don't get an answer by the way, I plan on doing the first option mentioned.**

 **Okay, that's about it! Thanks for reading this long-ass author's note,**

 **~Gentlesoul**


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